Vershoks to Millimeters (vershok to mm)

1 vershok equals 44.45 millimeters exactly.

1 vershok = 44.45 millimeters

How to convert vershoks to millimeters

To convert vershoks to millimeters, multiply the number of vershoks by 44.45. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply millimeters by 0.02249718785 (rounded).

millimeters = vershoks × 44.45

Example: 10 vershoks = 444.5 millimeters.

About these units

Vershok (vershok)

Russian (Imperial)Historical unit (no longer in standard use)

1.75 inches (4.445 cm), the Russian 'finger-breadth'. Sixteen vershoks make an arshin.

Vershok comes from a Russian word for a tip or top, and the unit was the smallest everyday step in the Russian system of body-derived lengths, roughly the breadth of the two upper joints of a finger. Tailors, carpenters and merchants counted heights and small dimensions in it, and it was usually quoted as the amount by which a person or an object stood above the next full arshin.

The figure used here is 4.445 cm, which is exactly one and three quarter English inches and one sixteenth of an arshin. That tidy fit is no accident: Peter the Great fixed the arshin at 28 English inches in the 18th century, so the vershok inherited an English-inch size. Five arshins therefore span 80 vershoks, or 140 inches.

The unit lingers in language. The proverb about a child being two vershoks above the pot, meaning very small, still turns up in Russian speech. Russia made the metric system optional in 1900 and compulsory in 1918, and the old units were formally replaced in the Soviet Union in 1925.

1 vershok = 0.04445 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Vershok; Wikipedia: Obsolete Russian units of measurement

Millimeter (mm)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One thousandth of a meter. Used in engineering, manufacturing and rainfall measurement.

Carl Friedrich Gauss put the millimeter at the base of his 1832 proposal for absolute units, pairing it with the milligram and the second, although the centimeter-based CGS system later won out among scientists. The name combines the metric prefix milli-, from the Latin for one thousand, with the meter. Since 1983 a millimeter has been tied to the speed of light: it is the distance light covers in 1/299,792,458,000 of a second.

Millimeters are the language of fine mechanical work. Standard rulers are divided into them, digital calipers commonly read to 0.01 mm, and mechanical pencil leads come in 0.5 and 0.7 mm. Copy paper is about 0.1 mm thick, and a thin hair, at 0.02 to 0.04 mm across, is close to the smallest thing the naked eye can see. A wave with a frequency of 300 GHz has a wavelength of 1 mm. An inch is exactly 25.4 mm. One trap for readers in the United States is that mil there traditionally means a thousandth of an inch, not a millimeter.

1 millimeter = 0.001 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Millimetre; Wikipedia: Centimetre-gram-second system of units; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

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